The invention described herein relates to computer networking and, in particular, to improved methods, systems, and software for routing data at high speeds through a switch or other network routing device.
The explosive growth of the Internet has brought more and more users online every day and computer networks have assumed an increasingly important role in today's highly interconnected world. As users increasingly rely on the network to deliver required data, network traffic has increased exponentially. Moreover, with the adoption of new and more bandwidth-intensive applications, enormous burdens are placed on network infrastructure. Network administrators are thus constantly seeking faster and more reliable methods and equipment to transport data to accommodate these demands.
Ethernet, one of the earliest networking protocols, is today the most widely used method to transport data in computer networks. Robert Metcalf and David Boggs developed Ethernet as an experiment at the XEROX Palo Alto Research Center in 1973. At Ethernet's inception, the struggle to accommodate users' needs for bandwidth had not yet started. As network traffic demands at this time were quite low, Ethernet initially had a data transmission rate of 2.94 megabits per second (Mbps).
Metcalf, however, recognized the potential for rapid network growth and posited a theorem now known as “Metcalf's Law” which states that the value of a network expands exponentially as the number of users increase. Gordon Moore, an expert in the field of semi-conductor development, posited another theorem known as Moore's Law which states that the power of microprocessors will double every 18 months and their price will be reduced by half. When taken together, these two laws predict rapid growth of networking technologies: as users join the network, more people will want to join at an exponential rate equivalent to the rise in value of the network, while processing technologies to support this growth and faster transport are constantly increasing at rapidly diminishing costs.
The evolution of Ethernet technologies has followed theory. The first commercial release of Ethernet occurred in 1979 with a transmission rate of 10 Mbps-more than a three-fold increase over the experimental system created just five years earlier. Ethernet went through a variety of standardizations during the 1980s and line rates remained constant at 10 Mbps while the technology matured. In 1995, however, Ethernet became available at 100 Mbps. In 1998, bandwidth jumped again to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). Most recently, a new standard was adopted for Ethernet transmission rates at 10 Gbps representing a 100-fold increase in seven years.
Implementation of 10 Gbps network infrastructure requires overcoming significant hurdles not addressed by current advances in the art. For example, previous generations of Ethernet technology, although fast, had an ample number of clocks in which to perform packet analysis and retransmit data. With the rise of 10 Gbps Ethernet, however, calculations previously carried out over a given number of clocks must now be completed in a fraction of the time so that the desired bandwidth is in fact available.
There is thus a need for a systems and methods capable of efficiently accommodating data transfer rates over a network in excess of 10 Gbps.